Working in partnership, IT is very important to business

Sometimes as an IT services supplier you can feel like the enemy, people only see you as a cost and not as someone who wants to help and add value. We set up in business to bring the small business what the big business has. When I tell people this I nearly always add the rider "we did not realise that small businesses do not know what big business have, so it is very difficult to give (sell) people something they do not know they need." While I say this partly in jest, we did underestimate the gulf in approach between people in small business and those who work in larger corporate style businesses. They are very different environments, with different priorities and levels of money to spend, requiring different styles and approaches. Despite the differences, the need for IT is just as great in small business as in a big ones and our original aims are still relevant.

Hence, we were very pleased today when one of customers said he recognised that IT was very important to his business and the future. He wanted to raise the level of service and support to ensure the systems they had would work for them; in other words he was looking to change the type of relationship from just "supplier" to "partnership". This was music to our ears, the basis on which we want to work. All we have to do now is make it work, we want to establish a strong relationship where we can help to design, plan and maintain the IT systems to meet the business needs. Being valued for advice and design, not just fixing things that break.